Life and the Memory of it: Collages and Assemblages by Roxana Alger Geffen
THE CORNWALL LIBRARY
30 Pine Street
Cornwall, CT
June 30-August 18, 2023
In her upcoming show at The Cornwall Library, artist Roxana Alger Geffen presents a collection of inspired pieces made from everyday found objects and materials. The work consists of framed works on paper (collages) and sculptures (called assemblages when made with found objects). Each of the pieces, in her words, “contains a new world, a landscape pulled into being through my collaboration with materials.”
The inspiration and title for Geffen’s show come from “Poem” by poet Elizabeth Bishop. In the poem, Bishop is slowly transfixed by a dollar bill-size landscape painting unearthed from a steamer trunk. At first she dismisses the bland little painting, created many years before by a great-uncle she never knew, but as she looks at the details—the houses, tiny steeple and tinier geese—Bishop suddenly realizes that she knows the scene well. The painting brings her memories of the place to life, and her memories make the painting vivid and rich.
Geffen says: “The works in my show also try to make everyday pieces of the past newly vivid and alive. Like Bishop’s painting, my pieces are full of the past: bills paid, things bought and used, fabric torn, litter dropped. I collect these things from my daily life: scraps of cloth, receipts, envelopes, snippets of text, metal things I find on the ground. I assemble them into groupings, pulling them into an uneasy community of misfits. To me, these collages and assemblages each contain a new world, a landscape pulled into being through my collaboration with materials.”
Sculptor and collage artist Roxana Alger Geffen is the descendant of an old Cornwall family and has been a presence in the community since childhood. She now lives and works in Washington DC. For more than two decades she has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (VA), The Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey House (Alexandria, VA), and Flashpoint Gallery (DC), as well as dozens of group projects at such locations as the Kreeger Museum (DC), the Museum of Design Atlanta, A.I.R Gallery (NYC), and a recent traveling show with stops at the Skirball Cultural Center (LA) and the Capital Jewish Museum (DC).
Additionally, she has received several awards for her work, including two from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and has been selected for artist residencies at the Vermont Studio School and the Arlington Arts Center (VA). Geffen studied visual art at Columbia University as an undergraduate and received an MFA in painting from Boston University.